God and Science

[Transcribed from a carbon copy of a typewritten manuscript.]

Preliminary Remarks

In the realm of culture science now holds sway over human civilization.
But at the same time science has, in the realm of the mind, entered a
period of deep and fecund trouble and self-examination. Scientists have
to face the problem of over-specialization, and a general condition of
permanent crisis which stems from an extraordinarily fast swarming of
discoveries and theoretical renewals, and perhaps from the very
approach peculiar to modern science. They have, in general, got rid of
the idea that it is up to science to organize human life and society,
and to supersede ethics and religion by providing men with the
standards and values on which their destiny depends. Finally -- and this
is the point with which I am especially concerned in this essay -- the
cast of mind of scientists regarding religion and philosophy, as it
appeared in the majority of them a century ago, has now profoundly
changed.

There are, no doubt, atheists among scientists, as there are in any
other catogory of people; but atheism is not regarded by them as
required by science. The old notion of a basic opposition between
science and religion is progressively passing away. No conflict
between them is possible, Robert Williken declared. In many scientists
there is an urge either toward more or less vague religiosity or toward
definite religious faith; and there in an urge, too, toward
philosophical unification of knowledge. But the latter urge still
remains, more often than not, imbued with a kind of intellectual
ambiguity.

No wonder, then, that the subject with which we are dealing -- what is
the relation of modern science to man's knowledge of God -- demands a
rather delicate, sometime complicated, analysis. In order to clear the
ground, I shall begin with a few observations concerning the
characteristic approach and way of knowledge peculiar to science as it
has developed since post-Renaissance and post-Cartesian times, and
become in our day, through an effort of reflection upon its own
procedures, more and more explicitly aware of itself.

I don't disregard the differences in nature which separate physics from
other sciences like biology or anthropology for instance. Yet physics
is the queen of modern sciences, which, even when they cannot be
perfectly mathematized, tend to resemble physics to one degree or
another. So it is that for the sake of brevity I shall, while speaking
of modern science, have modern physics especially in view.

Modern science has progressively "freed" or separated itself from
philosophy (more specifically from the philosophy of nature) thanks to
mathematics -- that is to say by becoming a particular type of
knowledge whose data are facts drawn by our senses or instruments from
the world of nature, but whose intelligibility is mathematical
intelligibility. As a result, the primary characteristic of the
approach to reality peculiar to science may therefore be described in
the following way: that which can be observed and measured, and the
ways through which observation and measurement are to be achieved, and
the more or less unified mathematical reconstruction of such data,
these things alone have a meaning for the scientist as such.

The field of knowledge particular to science is therefore limited
to experience (as Kant understood the word). And when the basic
notions that science uses derive from concepts traditionally used by
common sense and philosophy, such as the notions of nature, matter, or
causality, these basic notions are recast and restricted by science, so
as to apply only to the field of experience and observable phenomena,
understood and expressed in a certain set of mathematical signs. Thus
it is that physicists may construct the concept of antimatter, for
example, which has a meaning for them, but neither for the layman nor
for the philosopher.

The expression "science of phenomena" is currently employed to
designate our modern sciences. Such an expression is valid only if we
realize, on the one hand, that the phenomena in questin are (especially
as far as physics is concerned) mathematized phenomena, and, on the
other hand, that they are not an object separate from, but an aspect of
that reality in se which is Nature. Let us say that science is
a genuine, though oblique, knowledge of nature; it attains reality, but
in its phenomenal aspect (in other words, in the aspect of reality
which is definable through observation and measurement), and by the
instrumentality of entities, especially mathematical entities, which
may be "real" and relate to what Aristotelian realism called "quantity"
as an accident of material substance, or may be purely ideal entities
(entia rationis) and mere symbols grounded on data of
observation and measurement.

Such ideal entities are the price paid for a tremendous privilege,
namely the mathematical reconstruction of the data of experience. I
observed a moment ago that modern science has freed itself from
philosophy thanks to mathematics. At first mathematics were used by
the sciences of nature in the framework of sense experience only. It
has happened, however, that for more than a century mathematics
themselves, starting with non-Euclidian geometries, have been breaking
loose, more definitely and more completely than before, from the world
of experience, and insisting on the possibility of developing -- in the
realm of merely logical or ideal being (ens rationis) -- an
infinite multiplicity of demonstrably consistent systems based on
freely chosen and utterly opposed "axioms" or postulates. Consequently
the science of phenomena (particularly physics) became able to pick out
among varioius possible mathematical languages or conceptualizations,
which make sense only to the mathematician, and deal with entities
existing only within the mind, the one most appropriate to a given set
of phenomena (while other sets of phenomena may be made mathematically
intelligible through quite another conceptualization). So it is that
from the point of view of common sense everything in the world capsizes
in the highest and most comprehensive theories of contemporary physics
as in Chagall's pictures. Modern science of phenomena has its feet on
earth and uses its hands to gather not only correctly observed and
measured facts, but also a great many notions and explanations which
offer our minds real entities; yet it has its head in a mathematical
heaven, populated with various crowds or signs and merely ideal, even
not intuitively thinkable entities.

These ideal entities constructed by the mind are symbols which enable
science to manipulate the world while knowing it as unknown, for then,
in those higher regions where creative imagination is more at work than
classical inductin, science is only intent on translating the
multifarious observable aspects of the world into coherent systems of
signs.

The fact remains that the prime incentive of the scientist is the urge
to know reality. Belief in the existence of the mysterious reality of
the universe precedes scientific inquiry in the scientist's mind; and a
longing (possibly more or less repressed) to attain this reality in its
inner depths is naturally latent in him.

But as a scientist his knowledge is limited to a mathematical (or
quasi-mathematical) understanding and reconstruction of the observable
and measurable aspects of nature taken in their inexhaustible
detail.

"Exclusive" scientists and "liberal" scientists

Now a distinction must be made between two categories of scientists,
whom I would like to call, on the one hand, exclusive scientists, and,
on the other hand, liberal scientists. This distinction has nothing to
do with science itself, for in both categories men endowed with the
highest scientific capacities can be found; but it is quite important
from the point of view of culture.

"Exclusive" scientists are systematically convinced that science is the
only kind of genuine rational knowledge of which man is capable. For
them nothing can be known to human reason except through the means and
intellectual equipment of science. Exclusive scientists may be of
positivist persuasion, and consequently reject any religious belief,
save perhaps some kind of mythically constructed atheistic religion,
like Auguste Comte's religion of humanity, which its high priest
conceived of as a "positive regeneration of fetishism," or like Julian
Huxley's "religion without revelation," which mistakes itself for a
product of the "scientific method." Or they may shun positivist
prohibitions, and superadd to scientific knowledge of a genuine, even
deep religious faith, but which supposedly belongs to the world of
feeling and pure irrationality. In no case is it possible, in their
eyes, to establish the existence of God with rational certainty.

To tell the truth, the assertion that there is no valid rational
knowledge except that of observable and measurable phenomena is
self-destructive (it itself is quite another thing than a mere
expression of inter-related phenomena). No wonder, consequently, that
in contradistinction to exclusive scientists, "liberal" scientists are
ready to look for a rational grasping of things which passes beyond
phenomena, and even (when they are perfectly liberal scientists -- I
think for instance of an eminent chemist like Sir Hugh Taylor, or an
eminent physicist like Leon Brillouin) to admit the necessity of
philosophy and of a properly philosophical equipment in order to make
such grasping feasible, and so to complement the knowledge of nature
provided by the sciences.

Nothing is more rational than the kind of extension of Niels Bohr's
"principle of complementarity" implied by the cast of mind of these
scientists. For, thus extended, this principle means simply that in
two different fields of knowledge, or at two specifically distinct
levels in our approach to reality, two different aspects in existing
things (the phenomenal and the ontological aspect) call for two
different explanations (for instance "Man's cerebral activity is
stimulated by such or such chemical" and "Man has a spiritual soul") --
which are moreover perfectly compatible, wince they have to do with two
essentially diverse objects to be grasped in things (so the medical
approach to a person as a patient and the aesthetic approach to the
same person as a poet are both distinct and compatible).

Einstein belonged to the category of liberal scientists. For many
years his notion of God was akin to that of Spinoza. Yet, as recent
studies on him have shown, he came, with the progress of age and
reflection, to consider the existence of that personal God whom he
first doubted as required by the way in which nature lends itself to
the rationalization of phenomena operated by science. As he said in an
interview in 1950, far from being an atheist he "believed on the
contrary in a personal God." Such a conviction meant in no way that
the existence of God was supposedly a conclusion established by
science, or a principle of explanation used by it. It meant that the
existence of God is a conclusion philosophically established with
regard to the very possibility of science.

Heisenberg and Oppenheimer are also liberal scientists. And so was, at
least virtually, Max Planck, though it was under the cloak of science
that every bit of philosophizing effort in him was concealed. He
believed in an "all-powerful intelligence which governs the universe,"
but not in a personal God, and he thought that we could and should
"identify with each other . . . the order of the universe which is
implied by the sciences of nature and the God whom religion holds to
exist." Such statements definitely transcend the field of experience
and measurable data, though they remain inherently ambiguous: for how
could an all-powerful reason govern the universe if it were not
personal? And the God whom religion holds to exist is a transcendent
God, who causes the order of the universe, but his philosophical
"identification" with this order would make him cosubstantial with the
world, as the God of the Stoics was.

Such intellectual ambiguity is not infrequent, I have already
mentioned the fact. Let us consider it now a little more closely. I
would say that the ambiguity In question is essential in exclusive
scientists so far as they take a stop outside science itself. They
emphatically deny the validity of any kind of rational knowledge of
reality which is not science itself. As a result, if they are not of
positivist persuasion, and do not think that all we can know is phenomena
alone, in other words, if, recognising that phenomena are but an aspect
of a deeper reality, they endeavor to go beyond phenomena, they do so
through an extrapolation of scientific notions which, brilliant as it
may be, is essentially arbitrary; or looking for a "noetic ~integrator"
they borrow it from some kind of metaphysics unaware of itself and
disguised as science -- and there is no worse metaphysics than disguised
metaphysics.

As regards liberal scientists the picture is basically different.
I would say that the ambiguity we are discussing can still most often be
found in them, but as something accidental, not essential to their cast
of mind; so that, as a matter of fact, there are good grounds to hope
that more and more of them will, in the process of time, free themselves
from it -- when philosophers will become more intent on meditating on
the sciences and learning their languages, and scientists more familiar
with the approach and language of philosophy (each one realizing at the
same time that the language or languages of the others are valid
instruments only for the others' work).

If a liberal scientist undertakes to go beyond the horizons of
science and tackle the philosophical aspects of reality, he too is liable
to yield to the temptation of making the concepts worked out by science
into the very components of his meta-scientific enterprise. The trouble
is that one can no more philosophize with non-philosophical instruments
than paint with a flute or a piano.

But such a state of affairs is only a side-effect of the fact that
scientists, however liberal, are prone,, as everybody is, to overvalue the
intellectual equipment they have tested in their particular field, and in
the handling of which they have full competence. Liberal scientists do
not, for all that, systematically deny the validity of another, perhaps
more appropriate intellectual equipment; they are aware, moreover of
the philosophical nature of their own effort of reflection upon science
and its procedures; and by the very fact they are, at least implicitly,
prepared to recognize the rights of that purely or genuinely
philosophical approach in which they, still often hesitate to put their own
trust. That is why the ambiguity of the way in which many of them go
in for philosophy is accidental ambiguity.

Furthermore, being accidental, such ambiguity can be removed; the
best proof of this is the fact that in actual existence it has been most
explicitly removed in some scientists who, when it comes to
philosophical matters, do not mind using themselves the strict philosophical
approach. At this point I am thinking in particular of the Epilogue
which the distinguished physiologist Andrew Ivy wrote for the book
"the Evidence of God," in which he insists that God's existence can
be rationally demonstrated with absolute certainty. Though a
professional philosopher would probably have added a few considerations
on knowledge through analogy and the non-restrieted value of the notion
of cause, these pages written by a scientist are, as they stand, a
remarkable piece of philosophy which enters with perfect intellectual
frankness and with the appropriate intellectual equipment a sphere
inaccessible to the instruments of science, and which gives to a truth
intuitively known to the intellect like the principle of causality its
full ontological bearing, so as to recognize the necessity of a Prime
Cause that absolutely transcends the whole field of experience.

The crucial question

The crucial question for our age of culture is, thus, whether reality
can be approached and known, not only "phenomenally" by science, but also
"ontologically" by philosophy.

This question is still more crucial for the common man than for the
scientist. For the impact of the habits of thinking prevalent in an
industrial civilization, in which manipulation of the world through
science and technique plays the chief part, results in a loss of the
sense of being in the minds of a large number of people, who are not
scientists but grant rational value to facts and figures only. Whereas
exclusive scientists know at least what science is and what its
limitations are, the people of whom I an speaking have no experience of
science, and they believe all the more naively that science is the only
valid rational approach to reality, nay more, that science has all the
rational answers which human life can need.

Consequently, any rational knowledge of God's existence -- either
prephilosophical (by the simple natural use of reason) or philosophical
(by the use of reason trained in philosophical disciplines) -- is a dead
letter as far an they are concerned.

Persons whose intellect has shrunk in this way may adhere to some
religious creed and have a religious belief in God -- either as a gift
of divine grace, or as a response to irrational needs or as a result of
their adjustment to a given environment. But they are atheists as far
as reason in concerned.

Such a situation is utterly abnormal. Religious faith is above
reason, but normally presupposed the rational conviction of God's
existence.

At this point we must lay stress on the nature of philosophy an
contradistinguished from sciences, and insist that philosophy is an autonomous
discipline, which has its own instruments; so that it is not enough to
add to scientific knowledge even a most intelligent philosophical
reflection; the proper philosophical training and proper philosophical
equipment are necesary.

Let us say that whereas science, or phenomenal knowledge, offers us,
with wonderful richness paid for by revolutionary changes, coded maps of
what matter and nature are as to the multifarious observable and measurable
interactions which occur in them, -- philosophy makes us grasp, with
greater stability paid for by limitation to essentials, what things are
in the intrinsic reality of their being. Though carrying common sense and
the natural language to an essentially higher level, philosophy is in
continuity with them, and is based on the perceptive (not only
constructive) power of the intellect as well as on sense experience. In
other words, being is the primary object of philosophy, as it in of
human reason; and all notions worked out by philosophy are intelligible
in terms of being not of observation and measurement.

As a result, we have to realize that in the very universe of
experience philosophy (the philosophy of nature) deals with aspects and
explanations in which science is not interested. Thus matter (that is,
material substances) is composed in the eyes of old but still valid
Aristotelian hylomorphism, of two elemental pure and indetermined
potentiality (materia prima), and determinative form or entelechy
(which, in man, is spiritual soul); whereas for science matter (or
mass, that is, a given set of measurable data expressed in mathematical
equations) is composed of certain particles, most of them impermanent,
scrutinized by nuclear physics. And it is up to philosophy to try to
bring into some sort of unity our knowledge of nature, not by making
science's explanations parts of its own explanations, but by interpreting
them in its own light, whether it sorts out what pertains to real though
phenomenal entities from what pertains to ideal entities in scientific
explanatory theories, or points out the philosophical truths (sometimes
to be improved and readjusted) which have some connection with these
theories, and especially with all the treasure of facts and factual
assertions which is mustered and continually increased by science.

Now being is not limited to the field of sense experience; it goes
beyond. And the basic concepts of reason which deal with being as such,
even though they apply first to the realm of experience, can apply
too -- in an "analogical" manner -- to realities which transcend
experience. As a result philosophy (this time I don't mean the
philosophy of nature, I mean metaphysics) can attain to realities which
escape sense experience and sense verification, in other words which
belong to the spiritual or "supra-sensible" order.

Let us remember at this point that philosophy is but a superior
stage in the natural use of reason, at the level of a knowledge which
is not only knowledge but wisdom, and which (in contradistinction to
common sense) is critically elaborated and completely articulated.
Prior to philosophy, the natural use of reason is natural in an
additional sense (in the sense of untrained and merely spontaneous); with
philosophy it is perfected by reflectivity, fully mature, and capable
of explicit demonstration, aware of its own validity.

It is by virtue of the very nature of human reason -- either
untrained or philosophically perfected -- that the concept of cause and
the principle of causality can lead us beyond the field of experience.
As Dr. Ivy has rightly pointed out, if the child uses the principle of
causality in asking why things exist, he does so not by reason of the
transitory peculiarities of "childish mentality," but on the contrary,
because he is awakening to genuine intellectual life.

There is, thus, a pre-philosophical, simply natural knowledge of God's
existence. It can be described as starting from the primordial
intuition of existence, and immediately perceiving that
Being-with-nothingess, or things which could possibly not be -- my own
being, which is liable to death -- necessarily presuppose
Being-without-nothingness, that is, absolute or self-subsisting Being,
which causes and activates all beings. This pre-philosophical
knowledge can also be described as a spontaneous application of the
principle: no artifact is possible without a maker.

And there is, in the realm of metaphysical wisdom, a philosophical
knowledge of God's existence, which is able fully to justify itself and
uses ways of arguing that proceed with full rational rigor.

The philosophical proofs of God's existence

The "five ways" of Thomas Aquinas are the classical example of the
philosophical approach to God of which I just spoke. It seems relevant
to give at this point some idea of them, at least of the first and the
last two.

The first way proceeds from Motion or Change, There is no fact more
obvious here below than the fact of change, through which a thing becomes
what it was not. But one thing can give to itself what it does not have,
at least in potency, and potency cannot pass to actuation by itself alone.
Everywhere where there is motion or change (even if it is self-motion as
in living beings), there is something else which is causing, the change.
Now if the cause in question is itself subject to change, then it in
moved or activated by another agent. But it is impossible to regress
from agent to agent without end; if there were not a First Agent, the
reason for the action of all others would never be posited in existence.
So it is necessary to stop at a Prime Cause, itself uncaused, absolutely
exempt from any change for it is absolutely perfect.

In the same manner the second way, which proceeds from Efficient
Causes at work in the world, and the third way, which proceeds from
Contingency and Necessity in things, lead to a Prime Cause without which
all other causes would neither be nor act, and which exists with absolute
necessity, in the infinite transcendence of the very esse subsisting by
itself.

The fourth way proceeds from the Degrees which are in things. It
is a fact that there are degrees of value or perfection in things. But
on the one hand wherever there are degrees it is necessary that there
exist, somewhere, a supreme degree; and on the other hand one thing is
good and another is better, but there can always be another still better,
so that there is no supreme degree in the possible degrees of goodness
or beauty, or finally being, of which things are capable. Goodness,
beauty, being are not in their fulness in any one of the things we touch
and see. The supreme degree of goodness of beauty, of being, exists
elsewhere in a Prime Being which causes all that there is of goodness,
beauty and being in things, a First Cause which does not have goodness,
beauty and being, but is self-subsisting Being, Goodness and Beauty.

The fifth way proceeds from the intrinsic Order and purposeful
Governance of the world. The very fact that in the material universe
things are engaged in a system of stable relations and that a certain
order among them exists and endures shows that they do not result from
chance. A purpose in at work in that republic of natures which is the
world. But such purpose cannot proceed from the things which compose
the world of matter, and which are devoid of understanding. This purpose
or intention must exist in an intellect on which things depend in their
very essence and natural activities. Thus in the last analysis it is
necessary to recognize the existence of a transcendent Intelligence, the
existing of which is its very intellection, and which is the Cause
of all beings.

I just summarized these ways to God in my own language and in the
briefest possible fashion, leaving aside all particular examples,
accidental to the demonstration, which were part of the imagery provided
to Thomas Aquinas by the physics of his time.

The ways in question pertain to the philosophical order. The notion
of cause has here its full ontological import, which connotes productivity
in being, in contradistinction to the mere relationships between phenomena
which science considers and in which a given phenomenon is a dependent
variable of another. Futhermore, we are led by rational argumentation
to a Prime Cause which in absolutely and infinitely transcendent, and
which the very concept of cause, like that of being, of goodness, of
intelligence, etc., attain only "by analogy" or in the mirror of things:
what they mean in God has a proportion with respect to God similar to
the proportion which what they mean in things has with respect to things;
but we don't grasp it in itself. God exists as no other being exists,
He is good as no other being is good, He knows and loves as no other
being does...

It must be noted that considered in their very substance the "five
ways' of Thomas Aquinas stand fast against any criticism. Modern philosophy
has been in this connection the victim of a tragic misunderstanding.
Descartes believed that from the sole idea of an infinitely, perfect being
the existence of this being necessarily followed (the so-called "ontological
argument"). Kant rightly stated that such "proof" was no proof at all.
But he also stated -- quite mistakenly -- that all other proofs of God's
existence implied the validity of the ontological argument and rested
on it; as a result, no valid proof was possible. And Kant's successors
followed on Kant's heels. Yet it is crystal clear that Thomas Aquinas'
five ways do not start from the idea of an infinitely perfect being;
they proceed in the opposite manner; they start from certain facts, quite
general and quite undeniable; and from these facts they infer the
necessary existence of a First Cause -- which is infinitely perfect.
Infinite perfection is at the end, not at the beginning of the demonstration.

Finally let us add that there are other ways, too, than the classical
five ways. I myself have proposed a "sixth way." As a matter of fact
there are for men as many ways of knowing that God exists as there are
steps he may take on the earth or paths to his own heart. For all our
perishable treasures of being and beauty are besieged on all sides by
the immensity and eternity of the One Who Is.

Sciences as witnessing to God's existence

Among all these approaches to God, one particularly significant for
the man of our present civilization is provided by science itself. The
sciences of phenomena -- though they remain enclosed in the field of
experience -- bear testimony to the existence of God in a double manner.
Here, as I previously noted, it is not a question of what science itself
tells us, but of the very existence and possibility of science.

In the first place: if nature were not intelligible there would be
no science. Nature is not perfectly and absolutely intelligible; and
the sciences do not try to come to grips with nature's intelligibility
taken in itself (that's the job of philosophy). They rather reach for
it in an oblique fashion, dealing with it only insofar as it is steeped
in, and masked by, the observable and measurable data of the world of
experience, and can be translated into mathematical intelligibility.
Yet the intelligibility of nature is the very ground of those relational
constancies which are the "laws" -- including that category of laws which
deal only with probabilities -- to which science seen phenomna
submitted; and it is the very ground, in particular, of the highest
explanatory systems, with all the symbols, ideal entities, and code
languages they employ (and with all that in them which is still
incomplete, arbitrary, and puzzlingly lacking in harmony) that science
constructs on observation and measurement.

Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an
intelligence? In the last analysis a Prime Intelligence must exist, which
is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the
first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes
order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of
regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams
of rediscovering in its own way.

Such an approach to God's to existence is a variant of Thomas Aquinas'
fifth way. Its impact was secretly present in Einstein's famous saying:
"God does not play dice," which, no doubt, used the word God in a merely
figurative sense, and meant only: "nature does not result from a throw of
the dice," yet by the very fact implicitly postulated the existence of
the divine Intellect.

But science offers us a second philosophical approach, which, this
time, relates to man's intellect. The sciences of phenomena, and the
manner in which they contrive ways of knowing and mastering nature --
ceaselessly inveigling it into more and more precise observations and
measurements, and finally catching it in sets of more and more perfectly
systematized signs -- give evidence, in a particularly striking manner,
of the power that human intelligence puts to work in the very universe
of sense experience. Now the intelligence of man -- imperfect as it is,
and obliged to use an irreducible multiplicity of types and perspectives
of knowledge -- is a spiritual activity which can neither proceed from
matter nor be self-subsisting, and therefore limitless and all-knowing.
It has a higher source, a certain participation in which it is. In other
words, it necessarily requires the existence of a Prime, transcendent and
absolutely perfect Intellige, which is pure Intellection in act and
whose being is its very Intellection.

This second approach is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fourth way.

To conclude, let us remark that our knowledge of the created world
naturally reverberates in the very reverence and awe with which our
reason knows the Creator, and on the very notion, deficient as it is and
will ever be, that we have of His ways.

By the very fact that science enlarges our horizons with respect to
this world, and makes us know better -- though in an oblique way -- that
created reality which is the mirror in which God's perfections are
analogically known, science helps our minds to pay tribute to God's
grandeur.

A number of the most basic notions and explanatory theories of modern
science, especially of modern physics, recoil from being translated into
natural languages or from being represented in terms of the imagination.
Nevertheless a certain picture of the world emerge from modern science;
and this picture (unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism,
a space-time continuum which implies that space and time are not empty
pre-existing forms but come to existence with things and through things;
gravitational fields which by reason of the curvation of space exempt
gravitation from requiring any particular force, and outwit ether and
attraction; a cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the
heavenly laboratories of elements, a universe which is finite but whose
limits cannot be attained, and which dynamically evolves toward higher forms
of individuation and concentration... ) constitutes a kind of framework or
imagery more suited to many positions of a sound philosophy of nature than
that which was provided by Newtonian science.

Furthermore, at the core of this imagery there are a few fundamental
concepts which, inherent in modern science and essential to it, have a
direct impact on our philosophical view of nature.

In the first place I shall mention all the complex regularities
(presupposed by statistical laws themselves), and the mixture of
organization and chance, resulting in a kind of elusive, imperfectly knowable
and still more striking order, that matter reveals in the world of microphysics.
It make our idea of the order of nature exceedingly more refined and more
astonishing. And it makes us look at the author of this order with still
more admiration and natural reverence. In the Book of Job Behemoth and
Leviathan were called to witness to divine omnipotence. One single atom
may be called to witness too, as well as the hippopotamus and the
crocodile. If the heavens declare the glory of God, so does the world of
micro-particles and micro-waves.

In the second place comes the notion of evolution evolution of the
whole universe of matter, and, in particular, evolution of living organisms.
Like certain most general tenets of science, evolution is less a
demonstrated conclusion than a kind of primary concept which has such power in
making phenomena decipherable that once expressed it became almost
impossible for the scientific mind to do without it. Now if it is true
that in opposition to the imobile archetypes and ever-recurrent cycles
of Pagan antiquity Christianity taught men to conceive history both an
irreversible and as running in a definite direction, then it may be said
that by integrating in science the dimension of time and history, the idea
of evolution has given to our knowledge of nature a certain affinity with
what the Christian view of things is on a quite different plane. In any
case, the genesis of elements and the various phases of the history of the
heavens, and, in the realm of life, the historical development of an immense
diversity of evolutive branches ("phyla"), all this, if it is understood in
the proper philosophical perspective, presupposes the transcendent God as
the prime cause of evolution, -- preserving in existence created things and
the impetus present in them, moving them from above so that superior forms
may emerge from inferior ones, and, when man is to appear at the peak of
the series of vertebrates, intervening in a special way and creating
ex nihilo the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man and of every
individual of the new species. Thus evolution correctly understood offers
us a spectacle whose greatness and universality make the activating
omnipresence of God only more tellingly sensed by our minds.

I do not believe, moreover, that science fosters a particularly
optimistic view of nature. Every progress in evolution is dearly paid
for; miscarried attempts, merciless struggle everywhere. The more detailed
our knowledge of nature becomes, the more we see, together with the
element of generosity and progression which radiates from being, the law
of degradation, the powers of destruction and death, the implacable
voracity which are also inherent in the world of matter. And when it
comes to man, surrounded and invaded as he is by a host of warping forces,
psychology and anthropology are but an account of the fact that, while
being essentially superior to all of them, he is the most unfortunate
of animals. So it is that when its vision of the world is enlightened
by science, the intellect which religious faith perfects realizes still
better that nature, however good in its own order, does not suffice, and
that if the deepest hopes of mankind are not destined to turn to mockery,
it is because a God-given energy better than nature is at work in us.

Maritain, Jacques. The Degrees of Knowledge. New translation, New York:
Scribner, 1959.